I Stopped Running Playwright in Cron and Built a Screenshot Archive Instead

Taking one website screenshot with Playwright is easy. Keeping a scheduled screenshot job healthy for months is where the work starts: browser updates, missing system libraries, hanging pages, and a growing pile of images with names nobody can search.

I moved the browser part to the rather than inventing an image comparison threshold around SHA-256.

Cost and retention

The Website Screenshot API is currently listed as pay per usage on Apify. There is no actor-specific fixed subscription shown on its store page, so the final cost depends on the compute consumed by each Playwright run and your Apify plan. Full-page captures and longer delays generally do more work than viewport-only captures.

Storage usually becomes the bigger local concern. A simple policy is to keep daily images for 30 days, one image per week for six months, and one per month after that. Never delete the manifest rows when pruning files. Mark them with a local_deleted_at field in a compacted manifest so the historical capture record remains honest.

For cron, run the script once per day and redirect standard error to your alerting system. A failed capture should leave the previous archive untouched, while successful captures arrive through atomic .part file replacement.